Sunday 31 January 2010

A few things

Ed Ruscha


"During the mid 1970s, Ruscha made a series of drawings in pastel using pithy phrases against fields of colour. The sentences and phrases evoke American vernacular and slang, draw attention to a particular experience, or recall the excesses of Hollywood culture. In a number of these works Ruscha draws attention to his own work and to the practice of other conceptually oriented artists working at the time. The monochromatic black and white points to Ruscha’s interest in making books, and particularly those he made dedicated to his series of black and white photographs."
(National Galleries)
The series of Ruscha's photography books, their titles bluntly advertising their contents, struck a chord with me in a way in which the interpretation of any material can be 'misrecognised' to create an ulterior metaphor to the one intended (or not intended) by the artist.
I also realised, in retrospect, that I saw these books in a small exhibition in Berlin over the summer of 2009.


Thursday 28 January 2010

Sunday 24 January 2010

Looking At People From A Lower Angle As To What I've Become Accustomed To





Europe : Retrospective



































Victor Brauner




Victor Brauner arrived on the Surrealist scene in 1933, where the Romanian artist was praised highly by Breton.
Brauner was intrigued and inspired by the transformation of the human face, aided by the chance occurrence of his 'pre-empted' facial disfigurement, which subsequently gave him the illusion of clairvoyance.
Brauner's interest in the disfigurement of the human eyes, portrays a sense of correlative style often seen in contemporary illustration.


Thursday 21 January 2010

Men shall know nothing of it


Max Ernst describes collage as
"the exploitation of the chance meeting of two remote realities on a plane unsuitable to them".